Meet Two Companies That Want to Revolutionize 4K Video

Bandwidth is creeping up, but the swifter solution is for 4K to get smaller. That's where Beamr and V-Nova come in.

3D TV never really found an audience—it felt too gimmicky—but 4K sets are selling at a rapid rate; over 8 million 4K TVs to date, 1.4 million in the US.

4K offers four times the resolution of HD, as well as richer colors and blacker blacks thanks to included high dynamic range (HDR) technology. How are viewers getting their 4K? In many cases, they're not. Broadcasters don't yet offer 4K content over the air, and the selection on cable and satellite is limited. That leaves many homes relying on online sources for 4K.

But streaming providers run into another problem: Most US homes don't have the bandwidth to stream 4K video. Although 15Mbps is considered the minimum speed at which to stream 4K, Netflix recommends 25Mbps. But according to the latest "State of the Internet" report from content delivery network Akamai, no state in the US has an average connection speed of 25Mbps; overall average speed is 15.3Mbps.

Rather than 4K video, many viewers are getting 1080p video that's upscaled by their 4K TVs. So how can people get the ultra-crisp video they want? Bandwidth is creeping up over time, but the swifter solution is for 4K to get smaller. Here's how two companies are trying to condense 4K.

Beamr For Tel Aviv–based Beamr, reducing the size of images comes down to dividing each frame into blocks, measuring the perceptual quality of each individual block, then reducing the size as low as possible without changing that measure of quality.

It's an approach that works on everything from JPEGs to UHD videos: Calculate the level of quality that the human eye can actually see, then optimize against it. This leads to smaller files in which the output looks unchanged to the viewer. Beamr's software examines elements such as texture, gradients, and edges when calculating perceptual quality.

For 4K video, Beamr has created its own optimization of the HEVC codec. HEVC is one of the main video codecs on the market, and it's used to create small files with high quality.

"The Beamr process, our magic and the secret sauce, is that we have developed a quality measure that's able to, on a frame-by-frame basis, drive the encoder to the lowest bit rate possible before it introduces artifacts," says Mark Donnigan, Beamr's vice president of marketing.

Artifacts are any type of visual error created during the encoding process. The most common artifact is blockiness, created when the video player has too little information on how a block should display. Beamr's software encodes a frame, measures the resulting quality, and re-encodes it if artifacts were introduced. It averages 1.5 encodes per frame.

Beamr is at the forefront of a move in video encoding that recognizes not all video needs the same level of compression to produce good results. Some genres, such as action or superhero films, have a lot of on-screen activity and use fast cuts. They need larger file sizes to look good to the viewer. Slower-paced dramas and animated films can be compressed more without sacrificing visual quality.

Solutions like Beamr that consider the type of video being compressed are called content adaptive. Approaching all genres with one-size-fits-all encoding results in some files that are too large and some that sacrifice visual quality. In December 2015, Netflix announced it had re-encoded its entire video library with an approach that looked at each title individually.

"The challenge that the industry has is when you look at 4K files, a high-action movie can require many more bits than can be streamed into the average US household to retain the quality and really deliver the best experience," Donnigan says. For slow-moving dramas, Beamr's content-adaptive HEVC optimization can get 4K files down to 10Mbps, while high-action blockbusters are closer to 25Mbps. Companies including Netflix, Dolby, Dalet, Sony, and IBM rely on Beamr's encoding and optimization tools.

V-Nova London-based V-Nova is a newer player in the video-compression space, and its Perseus codec, launched in April 2015, has an unconventional solution for reducing file sizes.

Most video-compression solutions (including Beamr) divide each frame into blocks, then reduce the amount of information for each block. Perseus, on the other hand, produces the lowest-size image for each frame first, then adds detail to create successive higher-resolution versions. These are streamed using a technology called adaptive streaming, and the player and connection determine which version to use at any moment. Because the frame is never divided into blocks, there are no problems with blocky artifacts. Lower-file-size videos appear softer, with less detail, but aren't blocky.

"Perseus is a different approach to video compression. It really rewrites the underlying grammar of how we interpret data in general and video in particular," says Fabio Murra, V-Nova's senior vice president for product and marketing.

V-Nova's radical approach has resulted in radical compression claims. The company has successfully streamed 4K video of 6Mbps over a cellular network and produced 4K movies at 4Mbps.

Early tests have shown that V-Nova does indeed produce significantly smaller files than the competitors, and its visual results stand up to scrutiny. That's why this newcomer has already won a few major clients, including French satellite operator Eutelsat and satellite TV platform Sky Italia.

Related Articles

Its process, however, raises a question: When is a 4K image no longer a 4K image? Perseus creates ultra-small files that literally have a 4K resolution, but do those videos include the level of detail that viewers expect with ultra-high definition (UHD) video? Murra says it's up to customers to decide what they think is acceptable.

"The way the algorithm works, it starts with a smaller version of that picture and basically enlarges it, adds detail, enlarges and adds detail. We can always get the resolution to 4K. Even if you give us 1MB, we get a 4K picture because it's going to be a 4K resolution," Murra explains. "Obviously it's going to be so soft that you say, 'Hey, this is not 4K anymore.' It's a very valid question, and this is why we do a lot of tests. We do comparative tests or tests with our customers that say, 'OK, this is your content, how far do you think you can push it?'"

Pushing it is exactly what network operators need to do right now, with video traffic making up a growing percent of online data, and perhaps V-Nova's solution will be the one that allows us unlimited UHD content without choking the networks. When that happens, we'll know that our 4K TVs are finally showing us 4K video.

More Inside PCMag.com

About the Author

Troy Dreier is a technology writer and editor based in Jersey City, NJ. He’s the editor of OnlineVideo.net, senior associate editor for StreamingMedia.com, and a former staff editor for PC Magazine. He’s @tdreier on Twitter. See Full Bio